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Support for Tags Populating / Updating Grouping ID3 Field

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tzylstra

09 Feb, 2010 03:30 AM

Hello,
After much research, it appears to me the most elegant way to apply a variety of song specific metadata (i.e. Introspective, Detroit Soul Rock, Motown, New Wave, Piano Ballad, etc.) and maintain compatibility for the long term with iTunes SmartPlaylist logic is to use the ID3 "Grouping" Field.

I was wondering if beaTunes could enhance the "Get Info - Tags - Previously Used Tags" function in two ways:

1) Offer an option to save all the tags to the ID3 Grouping field
2) Build functionality that allows this tagging of the songs Grouping field to update the existing grouping field contents rather than replace

Thanks!
Tom

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by hendrik on 09 Feb, 2010 07:45 AM

   

   Well, one could certainly write a TagToGrouping plugin for beaTunes (see http://www.beatunes.com/news/labels/Plugin.html), to make that happen.

   -hendrik

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2. 2 Posted by tzylstra on 13 Feb, 2010 10:14 PM

   

   Fair enough, that is a challenge I am game to take on. I have read the plugin information and having never written an API/JavaScript before, was hoping for just a couple of common sense guidance items to get me going.

   Are there some plugin development tools beaTunes that could be suggested in addition to Maven2?

   Assuming once I get a functioning Java editor, can simply take an existing plugin, grab the jar/source files, use some common sense and start developing!

   Thanks in advance,
   Tom

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3. Support Staff 3 Posted by hendrik on 14 Feb, 2010 12:31 PM

   

   Hi Tom,

   if you have never programmed Java before, this may be a little difficult.

   But, I would recommend using IntelliJ IDEA community edition as a Java editor.
   Then download the latest KeyToGrouping plugin project (it has the source code) and run
   

   mvn idea:idea
   

   at its root. mvn is the command line tool for maven2.
   This will generate an IDEA project file so that you can easily open the project in the IDE.
   There are only two classes and they are more or less self explanatory. Make your changes and then create a new jar (that's the plugin archive). You create the jar with
   

   mvn clean install
   

   If compilation succeeds, you will find a jar file in the target subfolder. Copy that jar into the beaTunes plugin folder and start beaTunes to test.

   Feel free to ask more questions - I'm more than happy to help!

   -hendrik

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